Monthly Archives: November 2017

A few weeks ago, Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie stopped in NYC as part of his promotional tour for Azure’s cloud services. Normally, I don’t really care for these long informercials, but I decided to go in this case for two reasons. One, it took place in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, which was something historic I had always wanted to check out. Two, even though I’ve played with Azure’s offerings on occasion, I was curious what Guthrie would highlight in his presentation, especially after friends and colleagues had talked up Azure in the last couple of years. So, I went, and I was surprisingly glad that I did.

A few years ago, when I learned of some of Microsoft’s ambitions in the cloud space, I bought some MSFT shares and thought that they might catch up with Amazon in the cloud space. Impatiently, after a year, I began to have my doubts, and I sold off the shares. If you look at its latest price, that was clearly a mistake. I should have held onto them, and while listening to Guthrie’s presentation, it became painfully obvious as to why. Of course, he talked about the inherent power of Azure, with its various data centers around the world. (Which were all shown in a dramatic video seemingly directed by Michael Bay, with an intensely dramatic score blaring in the background.) However, it was the maturity of the platform, with its various tools and considerations for the user that was impressive.

Even though I’ve only dabbled with cloud platforms, I especially appreciate their raw power and penchant for structure. Even when you create apps that are meant to be deployed for the cloud, it heavily reinforces structure in their templates for developers. For example, if you build a web app within Visual Studio destined for Azure, it refers to queues in the project template by default (which are automatically available in Azure). You might question its need to reinforce such a feature through templates, thinking that the usage of queues in a web app as obvious. “What vital web service that receives a POST wouldn’t automatically queue that request, since the resources to fulfill the request might be temporary unavailable? Who wouldn’t do that?” Oh, you’d be surprised. Let’s just say that such bug-ridden deployments are not unheard of.

First, Guthrie talked about the typical use cases of cloud offerings, like creating and deploying a serverless app with ease or creating a container and deploying it with Kubernetes. Even when he talked about deploying apps to specific data centers, those features were interesting but expected. (I still have mixed feelings about the Azure Portal dashboard, but since that’s an argument about interfaces, that’s an entirely different subject.)

However, I was more impressed when he started talking about the other free tools offered by the platform that were supplemental. For one, its inherent monitoring system was akin to Splunk, and it could be used to monitor and query your entire setup (apps, databases, hosted servers, etc.), and you could customize your system instances with networking rules (like lock port 54545 every morning). Next, the number of devops options seemed more diverse than I remembered (with build options including Maven). There was even a tool which would suggest how you could reduce your expenses, like by consolidating servers and minimizing resources (storage, # of dedicated CPUs, etc.). After watching some examples of machine learning and image recognition, my only regret was that I had no reason to use them in my own projects.

After several years of concentrated effort, they had created an impressive, mature cloud platform that definitely could give Amazon a run for its money. I only had two points of contention. One, this promotional tour was somewhat eponymously named The Red Shirt Tour, since I was told by staff that Guthrie has a certain love for them. Aside from a terrible name for the tour, I would say ditch the symbolic shirt, since that will forever more belong to Jobs. Pick a hat, and in order to reinforce Azure, go for a blue beret instead.

Two, they served Subway for lunch. To which the answer is always no.

Yes, it was free. However, just like if you were offered torture for free, you shouldn’t accept it.